


The Life and Death of a Christmas Tree: A Tragedy

by MsCaptainWinchester (rons_pigwidgeon)



Series: 25 Days til Spideypool Christmas 2019 [4]
Category: Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Christmas Angst, Christmas Tree POV, Floor Sex, From the Tree, Heavy Angst, M/M, Wade Gets His Head Chopped Off
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:01:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21688765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rons_pigwidgeon/pseuds/MsCaptainWinchester
Summary: They had lived in the forest for seven winters when the man came. They had witnessed the felling of many of their people, the humans always as ruthless in the pillaging of the forest each winter as the woman was kind in sewing new seeds each spring. But they had always assumed the trees who were felled died with the last stroke of the ax, to be taken off for whatever cruel usage of their carcasses the humans intended. They were wrong.This wasn't meant to get so macabre. Don't read if you're an Ent sympathizer. It doesn't end well for the tree.
Relationships: Peter Parker/Wade Wilson
Series: 25 Days til Spideypool Christmas 2019 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1559260
Comments: 12
Kudos: 52





	The Life and Death of a Christmas Tree: A Tragedy

**Author's Note:**

> This is _technically_ MCD, but the Main Character is the Christmas Tree. And also _**very**_ briefly Wade. But it's Wade. 
> 
> Original Prompt: _Write a story from the Christmas Tree's perspective._ Found the prompt on a writing blog, but I can't remember which, and I don't have the energy to look it up. Will find and link later.
> 
> This one got way darker than I anticipated. WTF, Me?? WTF.

They had lived in the forest for seven winters when the man came. Seven long, cold winters full of fat, sleepy squirrels and skinny deer using their bark for scratching. Seven winters watching groups of humans walk their forest with weapons of hunting, some laughing and happy, some bitter and bickering. Once a female so distraught she collapsed at their roots and sobbed for an hour. The tears had felt tingly and sharp on their roots. They’d liked it.

But now a hulking man approached them, whistling a happy tune loud enough that it could be heard at the far reaches of the forest. He was tall for a human and strong-looking, but oddly broken, what skin was visible under his coverings mottled and red in ways they rarely saw in the forest. The whistling stopped when the man did. He stood a few feet away, considering them with an ax as broad as he was slung over one shoulder, muttering under his breath. Other humans would not have been able to parse his words, but the forest hears all. “This one looks fluffy. Petey likes fluffy, right? He hated that skinny one I got from the Guido. Gotta make this year special. Extra, extra special.”

The man must have made a decision because he took a sturdier stance and swung the ax hard, cracking into their trunk with a loud THWACK! They were shaken from root to stem by the impact, needles falling in curtains around them. It was shocking, traumatic like they were unable to comprehend. They could feel the severing of their ties to the forest, slow at first, and then faster with each violent swing of the ax.

They had witnessed the felling of many of their people, the humans always as ruthless in the pillaging of the forest each winter as the woman was kind in sewing new seeds each spring. But they had always assumed the trees who were felled died with the last stroke of the ax, to be taken off for whatever cruel usage of their carcasses the humans intended. But they did not die when they lost the connection with their roots, and the forest with it. They felt the WHOMP of impact with the ground, a new and not wholly pleasant sensation.

The human stood over them for a long, agonizing moment, like a predator surveying his kill, ax dropped sideways in the snow, a small crater surrounding it. They waited with an agitated sort of anticipation they were unused to and did not like. For the first time in their life, they had no idea what might come next. Would they be left to slowly rot in the snow, close to their roots but unable to reconnect? Would they be cut up into smaller pieces, as it was rumored the woman who sewed new seeds sometimes did with the thinnest and weakest of the trees?

While they pondered their fate, the human picked up the ax once more in one hand and their trunk in the other, and began to drag them in the direction the human had come from. It was jarring, the snow forced between their branches, needles being pulled off to leave a trail of green in their wake. They did not like the dragging sensation, did not like the pull of their branches. They called out to the forest for aide, but they were no longer connected, and the forest could do nothing.

They were dragged into an area outside of the forest—they had not known there was an outside of the forest—and shoved trunk-first into a tube and forced into a mesh bag. It forced their branches up and close, too close. They did not like it. The shock of the unnatural bending and pressure sent them into a spiraling panic. They screamed out with every needle, frustrated anger bursting from them. This was too quick, too violent, too much. Their screams were silent, and the man paid them no mind.

When their outburst proved fruitless, they stopped. Stopped screaming, stopped paying attention, stopped questioning what happened next. Just stopped.

They became aware again to pain, forceful, driving pain. They were on their side in an enclosed space that smelled of bodies and something spicy and sizzling, the air full of warm oils and seared meat. And pain. So much pain. The hulking man was drilling holes into their trunk, followed by the digging, digging, digging of metal being screwed into their wood. The netting was still suffocating them, and the screws driving in made them crazy with anger. They wanted to flail their branches and strike out at the human for hurting them, but without their connection to the forest, they could not move even a small distance. They were trapped, forced to endure the further mutilation of their form.

Eventually, the human must have been satisfied with his torturous work, because he stood and brushed off his hands with a pleased noise and then dragged the tree upwards. They thought they would be able to balance on their trunk, but they did not touch the ground. The screws anchored them into some kind of base, suspended in the air like a rabbit caught in a snare, slowing dying.

A few minutes after they were made upright, the man came back from a separate room and began pouring water into what must have been a container held within their anchor base. The water lapped at their trunk, cold but satisfying. They soaked up the hydration and sighed with their whole being, the first bit of comfort they had felt since their violent untethering.

The netting was cut off, finally allowing them to spread their branches once more. They could not stretch their limbs out to the light of the sun, could not soak up the sun’s nourishing rays anymore, but it was a balm on a traumatic day. The man stood back with his hands on his hips and nodded to himself. “Perfect fit. Knew there was something I couldn’t fuck up. Petey’s gonna love this.”

The man stared at them for a few more moments before turning and walking away. They were left to their own thoughts and the constant, intense pain of the screws in their trunk. How they could still feel pain without the comfort of their forest family was a mystery, but not even the banging sounds from a distant room was enough to distract from the pain.

-

Sometime later, the entrance to the room they were stood up in slammed open and another human walked in. He was slimmer and slightly shorter than the ax-wielder, with fur growing on his head and oddly-colored outer layers. They had been surprised when the ax-wielder removed their black outer layer to reveal a much brighter red patterned inner layer. They had not thought the humans capable of molting. The smaller human wore a different skin, bulkier and dark blue like the night sky. He removed a satchel from across his shoulders and then the outer layer. The difference in size between when the human walked in the door and when he took off his outer skin was startling. Did humans normally decrease in size by a decade’s growth in an instant? 

The human noticed them as he was hanging up his skin, a soft pause in the draping of the skin on a hook before he let the skin go and walked directly to them. “Where’d this come from?” he said. He touched one of their branches with a fingertip, then lifted the branch up and let it fall back to its rightful place. The spring of movement acted as mocking parody of the wind in their branches. It made them yearn for the forest and their former life, fresh and raw in their thoughts.

“Did you get this from Guido’s? It’s fluffier than his usual ones,” the human said, louder than his previous speech and directed behind him towards where the ax-wielder had disappeared to earlier. There was no response. In the quiet, the human looked around the room and discovered the giant ax that had been left near them. He stared at it for a long moment. “Did you steel Thor’s ax? How’d you even pick it up? Don’t you have to be worthy?”

“Are you saying I’m not? Who wouldn’t be worthy of this?” the ax-wielder said, walking through the back doorway in a new skin, soft gray around the legs and black over the chest and shoulders. The arms matched the skin of the man’s face, angry red and pock-marked and heavily scarred. The smaller human had no scars.

“I’m saying I’m surprised. Also, I think you might have gone slightly insane again. Did you really steal Stormbreaker to chop down a Christmas tree? Thor’s going to chop your head off with it when he finds out,” the smaller human said, watching as the ax-wielder approached and leaned down to touch their mouths together.

“He’ll have to find it first,” the ax-wielder said. He put an arm around the smaller man’s waist and touched their mouths together again. It was an odd thing to watch. Was it a form of greeting? A way of assessing health? They had never witnessed two creatures touch mouths except in competition, teeth bared and growling or hissing. The smaller human did make a noise, but it did not sound of anger.

“You brought us a Christmas tree,” he said when they pulled away from one another.

“I did. You said you wanted a big, fluffy one this year.”

“And Guido’s are shit, yeah. Did you actually go out and cut one down yourself? Why didn’t I get to come? I didn’t even know you had a car.”

The ax-wielder looked away from his smaller human, his expression similar to what they had seen of foxes after stealing their littermate’s food. “That’s not important. What matters is that now we have a Christmas tree, and you’re home from work, so we get to decorate it now, right?”

The smaller human looked like he might start arguing, but then must have decided against it. Instead, he pressed his mouth to the ax-wielder’s cheek and stepped away towards the back doorway. “Let me get changed, and we can get started. Delivery?”

“Pizza?”

“You need to ask?”

The small human disappeared, and the ax-wielder pulled out a black rectangle and began talking to himself and the tree lost the thread of what was happening for a long while.

-

The argument over lights went on for twenty minutes before the smaller human—they thought the man might be the ‘Petey’ the ax-wielder had spoken of just before they were traumatically sundered, though the hulking human rarely called him by the name—insisted that blinking lights would irritate his sensitive eyes and refused to hear any more arguments. They had not understood what the end result of the argument would be until both humans approached with ropes of green plastic that glowed warm, blueish light and began wrapping them in it.

They worried at first that this would be like the netting of earlier, but the warmth of the lights left a tingling, pleasant sensation on their branches, like tiny balls of sunshine. They could no longer take in the light and grow from it, but the feeling was nice all the same.

Much later, after the humans had taken nourishment and spent what felt like an eternity weighing down their branches with trinkets, they stood to the side of the tree and gyrated together in odd, jerking movements that reminded the tree of animals having fits just before death overtook them. They now knew that death looked very different for themself than it did for other creatures, but they did not think the humans were close to death. They looked happy, chatting and singing along to the loud, odd music that filled the dwelling.

The music calmed to something softer and more like the sounds of the forest during a spring rain. The humans stopped gyrating and came together, their arms around each other, their hands clasped, and swayed together in time with the music. The tree understood it not at all, but they both looked to be enjoying themselves.

They began touching faces again, the wet sounds of their mouths mashing together uncomfortably loud over the soft music. Ax-wielder had his massive arms wrapped tight around Petey, his hands roaming all over his backside, while Petey made pleased sounds under his breath.

Soon, they began peeling off yet more layers of colorful skin until they reached a more unified layer, one that looked like the skin of their faces and hands. Were the other layers not skin? Were they some sort of protective covering instead? The tree thought they must be, as the spare skins did not pool or ripple the way shed skin did. They did not look brittle like a husk.

The humans continued to touch mouths as they sank to the floor and tangled together. And then suddenly the tree understood what the mouth-touching meant. It was a mating ritual of some kind, perhaps necessary to complete a coupling. They continued to mouth-touch as they mated on the floor, a vigorous, fervent thing not unlike the gyrating from earlier. They growled and grunted the way animals did, thrusting together to reach the climax of a mating as one. It was the first and only human act the tree understood.

When it was done, they lay together for a long time, curled up in each other’s arms and talking while watching the tree. They did not mind the staring, though they did not understand the purpose. Eventually, the pair got up together, turned off all the lights, and disappeared through the back doorway, leaving them in the quiet dark by themself.

In the silence that was not like any silence they had ever known, they yearned for their forest once more and mourned the connection they knew they would never feel again.

-

Days blurred, filled with the humans performing odder and odder actions that the tree grew wary of trying to understand. There were boxes wrapped in brightly colored paper and spikey bows set under their branches. The humans created nourishment together in the form of small, differently shaped wafers that resembled deer and tiny people, but smelled of sweet sugar and sap. The activity ended in a mating, as the tree grew to learn most of their activities did.

They mated frequently, on the floor several more times, but also on the rectangular bedding they often sat on, and twice in the area where they prepared nourishment. Late at night when the humans disappeared into the back doorway, they could hear the sounds of them mating again. It was a wonder they coupled so often when neither was in heat or rut and both possessed identical genitalia. They did not think the humans could produce offspring in the same manner as the trees, thought they required two different sets of reproductive organs to achieve new life, but still, they seemed determined to try.

When the massive man came to their door with a booming voice and shoulders as wide as their doorframe, the tree recognized the presence of a god and felt their branches quiver with anticipation. Surely, the god would see their suffering and release them from it.

But the god only yelled at the ax-wielder, took the ax up with a commanding grip, and lopped off the ax-wielder’s head. The tree was shocked that the ax-wielder’s head was still able to speak while separated. And when the god picked the head up and placed it back on the ax-wielder’s body before taking the ax and stomping back out the entrance, the tree decided it was perhaps better not to try to understand the workings of humans.

Days passed, and it became more and more difficult to soak up the water replenished for them each day. Soon, they could no longer soak up any new moisture, their cells becoming sluggish and dull.

As the moisture left them, the days began to blur, one into another. They lost time, hours first, then whole days. They’d come aware to a curtain of needles at their base, nearly naked and dry. So very dry. And then one day they were aware of being jostled, picked up and laid on their side, and the screws that had once been so painful but could no longer be felt were removed. They were dragged out into the open air, as cold and dry as they felt. The last sight of the hulking man was of him walking away, muttering to himself as he picked needles off his sweater.

By the time the giant, loud truck arrived to turn them into mulch, they were already fading away.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want writing updates from me, you can follow me on Twitter [@RonsPigwidgeon](https://twitter.com/RonsPigwidgeon), [Tumblr](https://mscaptainwinchester.tumblr.com/), [NewTumbl](https://mscaptainwinchester.newtumbl.com/), or [Pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/MsCaptainWinchester).
> 
> And if you'd like to come yell about Spideypool with me, join the 18+ Discord server I co-mod, [Isn't It Bromantic](https://discord.gg/w6UyAn7)!


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